Uvalde Texas to Nashville Tennessee
is near as a tavern jukebox, is twice as far
as Jesus to Judas, as a rusty Plymouth car
to a bus with a bedroom. We look outside to see

hundreds come honking to listen to whistle to praise
the picker among us, come to tell us again
about the differences, as mostly between
how we imagine marriage those quick days

till we do marry, and how we learn to live
together after the debts and beer
and strangers’ crotches open everywhere.
I watch to learn the life you learn to give

to tell the love and sickness in our skin
and neon lights and darkness. Lord we crave
those words for hardness of our bones, to save
the soul from puffiness. You put us in

flat touch with what we are, and make that touch
bearable first, then almost pleasant and then
plain necessary, how we try to mend
our nervous ways for nothing and drink too much

and want bad love. I listen to you sing
while lean red faces eat you up alive
to know by what bright secrets we survive
the flesh’s soft transgressions. No rhyming thing

will give the sense men want of who they are.
Or undo the differences we didn’t mean
to deal with once—as for instance between
the bus with the bedroom and the rusty car.

Which is a green distance and does grow
while the car in the side mirror shrinks away
and you want to touch the driver’s shoulder and say
Man, we’re going too fast. You don’t though.